Bucknell University Press: You’ve known most of your life that your father was both a brilliant painter and a hoarder. Did you plan to write this memoir even before your father died?

Sascha Feinstein: I didn’t seriously consider Wreckage as a book project until after he died, when I started clearing the land and buildings on Cape Cod (and, to a lesser extent, the house in Philadelphia). I also couldn’t write quickly because so much had to be unearthed for me to understand both the process of renovation and the artifacts themselves, and that took years. I’m still finding buried objects! But the majority of the labor and writing took place within the first ten years of his death [2003 – 2013].

As a writer, I’m most interested when polarities flourish simultaneously. And I had to get physically involved in the wreckage in order to speak about the disastrous rot and decay taking place in these locations of extraordinary creativity. When you braid that kind of double helix, art will emerge beyond the confines of anecdotes.

Did you find the book cathartic?

I’m frequently asked that question, and I still don’t have a slick answer! The process of saving the Cape property—which involved, among other things, the removal of over 30 tons of refuse—certainly liberated the residence itself, as did the extermination of monstrous poison ivy vines and tenacious bamboo. The making of the book (as with the making of anything creative) certainly made me feel alive as an artist. But in terms of catharsis, I would have to say that, yes, telling the stories and illuminating scores of people who thought they knew the totality of his character became a great emotional release.

He had a terribly controlling nature, so he swiftly attacked any challenge with vitriolic contempt. I never had, nor could I have had, an honest conversation with him about his hoarding. Art, yes, but nothing negative, nothing that might challenge his maniacal machismo. So I’ve finally had my day in court, so to speak.

You’ve described your writing style as “collage-like.” Why did you decide to create that kind of structure as opposed to a more standard, chronological narrative?

I tend not to view time in a linear way, and I’m much less interested in chronology than I am theme and metaphor. I want each chapter/essay to be an emotional journey, one governed by theme as opposed to time. (In that sense, I see strong parallels between my poetry and my prose.) Ideally, I’d like the reader not merely to remember specific stories but to return to chapters and revisit connective imagery. It demands much more of the reader, of course, but I hope the effort is worth the personal engagement.

I also wanted this form because it’s similar to the kinds of paintings that my father nurtured in his painting classes. He created immense still lifes out of broken and abandoned objects; from these, the students needed to find patterns and transitional colors in order to make the paintings achieve balanced movement and tone—to make them swing and evoke strong emotion.

I say “emotion” rather than “meaning” because we tend to associate “meaning” with narrative; these works were obviously nonrepresentational. If you look at the still life on the cover of the book, for example, you’ll find a tree trunk (still sprouting) holding an elongated, cracked vase of sorts, onto which my father attached a broken tea pot. This has no narrative meaning, but structurally—when we remove the associations of “tea pot” and “tree trunk”—they create interesting forms, echoed in their ringed movements by other objects in the still life. It was the artists’ challenge to transform the canvas into a cohesive, rhythmic statement, much like a writer linking themes and metaphors. So I think there’s a direct corollary to the chapters in Wreckage, where I take myriad sources to generate thematic coherence. (I originally called Selected Sources a “still life of sources,” but that was eventually changed by the editors.)

When it came to understanding and creating art, your father had the highest standards, and yet he seemed to collect junk not necessarily for aesthetic reasons, or even for specific projects, but almost arbitrarily. Is that fair to say?

Absolutely. He rarely collected junk with the thought of building something specific out it, like Simon Rodia and the construction of Watts Towers. Some exceptions on the Cape property included a large creature that he called The Monster and a large stone table. But most of what he hoarded simply disappeared over the years: rotting lumber, bags of Salvation Army clothing, file cabinets filled with ripped-out magazine articles, buckets of rusted nails, car hoods, tree trunks, hardened cement, you name it. Over the years, of course, the new still lifes would eclipse old ones, and the teaching locations lost workable space the way vines choke out landscapes. (This is partly why the first chapter is called “Wisteria.”) But you’re absolutely right: He didn’t really prize the junk he found; he merely wanted things because someday they might be used, either practically or artistically.

Given the extent of his collecting, how visible were his paintings in the house?

For a person whose life centered around art, it’s somewhat shocking to think how few paintings actually hung on walls. One exception would be Summer, which I mention several times in Wreckage, including a charming story of a woman visiting the U.S. from Russia who practically collapsed from sensory overload. “The sky, the sea,” she said. “I’m staying.”

The rebuilt Cape house, and my other Pennsylvania home, present the opposite aesthetic: Most walls feature work by my parents. (My mother was a painter, weaver, and textile designer.) I have more art than I can hang—but that’s a lovely problem.

Does this mean you don’t plan to collect lots of junk as you get older?

Absolutely not! One thing that the experience taught me was how much I don’t want to leave behind for our children. In fairness, I am a collector (mainly of music and books), but the difference between being a collector and a hoarder is pretty vast. At least I hope so.

And I have no regrets that I threw out so many tons of refuse. My father’s legacy should be art, not junk, and when I look at his glorious canvases, I forget the tremendous effort that took place in order to show them.

*Save 30% on this book with code 8S17BUP order here

April is National Poetry Month. Since its inception in 1996, National Poetry Month has evolved into one of the largest cultural events celebrating imagination, language, emotion and contemplation. On a gorgeous spring day, we invite you to celebrate the beauty of poetry with us and carry on the joy of reading poetry all year long.

Below are some of the books of poetry published by Bucknell University Press since 2000:

 

Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse by Antjie Krog 

This is the first English translation of an award winning book published in Afrikaans in 1989.  It engages critically and creatively with a key moment of colonial history – the time Lady Anne Barnard spent at the Cape of Good Hope, from 1797 to 1802. Usually mentioned merely as a witty hostess of fabulous parties, Anne Lindsay Barnard, the daughter of a Scottish Earl and the wife of a colonial administrator, was an independent thinker and a painter and writer of genius. Antjie Krog acts as bard and chronicles an epic about this remarkable heroine’s life in South Africa, and intertwines it with life two hundred years later in the same country but now in the throes of anti-apartheid anger and vicious states of emergency.

 

Strategically I do my best

1

strategically I do my best

the wheels crunch and

the cannon barrel shifts into the breach

 

2

the pelvis gets its familiar snap

knees easily fold their openness

even a slight slackness lets experienced lips smack

 

3

my days of fighting you are over.

I only want you preserved

As the one who remembers us

 

4

among the smoke and the slogan-shouting mouths

the accusations the violence the death in between

you belong nowhere you are the irrelevant wolverine

 

Catastrophic Bliss by Myronn Hardy

Catastrophic Bliss contemplates the longing to understand connections and disconnections within a world ever more fragmented yet interdependent. With allusions to Dante, Stevie Wonder, Fernando Pessoa, Persephone and Marianne Moore, these poems move from the tumultuous to the sublime: a pit bull killing an invading thief, two people on a New York City subway playing chess, Billy Eckstine recording in Rio de Janeiro, to an imagined Barack Obama writing poems to his father. Myronn Hardy’s third collection comprises war, place, love, and history all yearning to be reconciled.

 

Beginning and End of the Snow / Début et Fin de la Neige by Yves Bonnefoy, translated by Emily Grosholz

Yves Bonnefoy’s book of poems, Beginning and End of the Snow followed by Where the Arrow Falls, combines two meditations in which the poet’s thoughts and a landscape reflect each other. In the first, the wintry New England landscape he encountered while teaching at Williams College evokes the dance of atoms in the philosophical poem of Lucretius as well as the Christian doctrine of death and resurrection. In the second, Bonnefoy uses the luminous woods of Haute Provence as the setting for a parable of losing one’s way.

 

Cipango by Tomás Harris, translated by Daniel Shapiro

Chilean poet Tomás Harris’s Cipango–written in the 1980s, first published in 1992, and considered by many to be the author’s best work to date–employs the metaphor of a journey. The poems collectively allude to the voyage of Columbus, who believed that he’d reached the Far East (“Cipango,” or Japan), not the Americas. Building on that mistaken historical premise, Cipango comments on the oppressive legacy of colonialism in Latin America–manifested in twentieth-century Chile through the 1973 military coup by Augusto Pinochet and the brutal dictatorship there–and on the violence and degradation of contemporary urban society. The author’s vision is of a decadent, apocalyptic world that nonetheless contains the possibility for regeneration.

 

Poems and Elegies by Olga Sedakova, translate by Slava I. Yastremski AND Michael M. Naydan

An intensely philosophical and religious poet, Olga Sedakova writes of nature, music, and the inner, spiritual life. As one of the preservers of traditional Russian culture, she stands in stark contrast to the rampant commercialization in contemporary Russian life, instead tracing her poetic roots back to the early avant-garde movements of pre-revolutionary Russia. For that stance, she endured years of censorship and silencing during the Soviet regime her poems distributed by hand in mimeographed copies or by word of mouth. This volume introduces to an English-speaking audience an extensive selection of poems by one of Russia’s most distinguished lyric poets writing today.

 

Blues Baby: Early Poems by Harryette Mullen

Blues Baby: Early Poems brings together Harryette Mullen’s first book, Tree Tall Woman, with previously uncollected poems from the beginning of her career. Her early poems draw inspiration from the feminist and Black Arts movements, as well as her connections to diverse communities of writers and artists. The movement of this volume is loosely autobiographical – from childhood narratives to poems about sexuality to indirect evocations of the poet’s art. Many of the poems address the subject of family and community, often emphasizing the strength of women and female friendship; some evoke culturally specific traditions and locations; others of a satiric nature offer cultural critiques. Harryette Mullen’s poetics works within various traditions, including the confessional and the performative mode of the Black Arts poets, and throughout her free-verse lyrics are written with insight, humor, and musicality, and will appeal to a diverse readership.

 

Swimming With Dolphins by Adrian Oktenberg

When Aphrodite rises from the sea to touch her fingertip to Sappho’s hand in “The Creation” – the first poem in Swimming with Dolphins – the world begins. From this startling and inventive recasting of creation, Adrian Oktenberg sets the tone for her second collection. An intelligent sensuality pulses through these poems of love and loss – marvelously present in the fullness of pleasure, equally present in moments of crushing grief. The poet refuses to make small any suffering, whether it is personal, as in matters of erotic or familial love, or historical and political, as in her poems on the Argentine “disappeared” and the McCarthyite period in the United States. She finds that “after plain, plenitude comes.” “Swimming with Dolphins,” the major long poem which is the centerpiece of the books, is a bold exploration of erotic possibilities between women and, at the same time, a lush evocation of the natural world. In profound ways, this book opens our senses and affirms the regenerative power of life and love, even in the face of personal or historical catastrophe.

The Disappearing Poet Blues by Marc Hudson

The poems in Marc Hudson’s The Disappearing Poet Blues are driven by a moral anguish: how do we live, they ask, in strict circumstances; what is the worth of a profoundly limited human life; how can one be both a good father and a good artist? Emblematic of the poet’s exile and endurance are the severe landscapes of the Okanogan in Washington State and the Colville Indian Reservation, where Hudsons brain-injured son, Ian, was born and lived his first year. Later poems reflect the familys move to Indiana, where the less austere contours of the Midwest suggest a mellowing of grief. The poems of the second section metaphorically wrestle with many of the same concerns: Caedmon, the first Anglo-Saxon Christian poet, tells of the burdens of song; an Irish monk on his volcanic outpost longs for his homecoming in Christ. Hudsons The Disappearing Poet Blues has an ethical music and weight; but ragged and uncertain and human as it is, it also sings the blues.

 

Alluvial by Katherine Soniat

The sediment, or alluvium, deposited in a riverbed perpetually shifts and settles in response to water’s flux; in turn, its submerged contours shape the watercourse, creating shallows and rapids, treacherous holes and long placid runs, sculpting the restless shoreline.

Set in the watery landscapes of the Chesapeake Bay (the world’s largest estuary) and in Louisiana (land of braided tributaries), Katherine Soniat’sAlluvial charts the course of individual and collective histories influenced by the rich alluvium of culture and geography, ecology and autobiography. Lives large and small, recorded and unrecorded-those of Captain John Smith, Frederick Douglass, a community of Ursuline nuns, a home full of exiled children of tubercular parents, the poet’s mother, nameless others-merge into the past’s archetypal sediment, only to rise again in these beautiful poems to dance in memory’s drift and to filter a future always infused with the past.

 

The Fiddler’s Trance by Floyd Skloot

Poet, essayist, and novelist Floyd Skloot continues his exploration of human resilience in The Fiddler’s Trance, his third collection. Patterns of historical and personal experience in these poems illuminate the mysterious interaction of illness, loss, and creative endeavor. We can never be certain that our vital force or physical integrity will endure: Skloot’s poems consider the phenomenon of sudden change in our lives. When all we understood about ourselves and our world is called into question, we must find a new way of seeing. Mixing formal and free verse; moving freely between past and present, self and others, private and public life, the poems of The Fiddler’s Trance are concerned with the power of art to express hope honestly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The winners of the 2016-17 Book Collecting Prize sponsored by Bucknell University Press and Library & IT are:

1st place ($500 prize): Alana Jajko, “The Act of Finding”
Runners up ($250 prize): Jessica Khin, “My Journey Across Seas and Pages” & Adam Walker, “An Essay on the Library of A. Walker”

The Prize is made possible by the generous support of Mr. Thomas Whitehead ’63, who will present the winners with their awards Thursday, April 13, at 5 p.m. in the Traditional Reading Room, Bertrand Library. A lecture by Alberto Manguel, Director of the National Library of Argentina, will follow the presentation. Both events are free and open to the public.